Théâtre du Radeau François Tanguy

Passim

Theatre

First come the texts. They are arranged like a flamboyant tapestry - a flood of theatre extracts, and poems, fragments caught in motion. These texts are reminders of the word itself, which Michel Foucault longed to “slip inside”, and “be enveloped by, carried off far beyond all possible beginnings”. They are coupled with echoing music, costumes, lights - and a precariously balanced stage set, through which Shakespeare, Molière, Calderon, Flaubert and many others weave their path, accompanied by their guests: Beethoven, Schubert, Cage, and Xenakis among others. What we have is a brotherhood of ghosts who are full of life, and which Théâtre du Radeau has been summoning up and making heard for 30 years, rearranging their fleeting voices from fugue into impromptu. Coda, Ricericar, the project lead by François Tanguy is just a vast Passim - the Latin term referring to the recurrence of a word in several places. Here, the project turns into crafted hypertext, a mind space which actors and spectators navigate side by side. In this zone, snatches of texts haunt, and go right through us - carried along by the free interplay of associations.

From out of this theatre, long since cast off from any narrative thread, images arise - of death, excess, and love, following in the steps of the dream-like, evanescent dramaturgy. It is as though each text reaches out to and takes in all the others, in an interplay of reflections forming a theatrical kaleidoscope. Within this heteroclite workshop, panels slide back and forth on the cobbled up stage-set, exposing actors as if they had been torn from a picture, the paint still wet. Passim extends beyond the framing of its own making, and etches out the outline of what theatre could still be, and make happen.